I’m getting ready to fire up the Bricker Time SUV and head back to a more peaceful, undeveloped time – North America before Jamestown, before Eric the Red, before all of that. But I would like to be able to find some to play gin rummy with every now and then, so I wouldn’t want to go so far back in time that humans haven’t made it over here at all.
How far back do I have to go in order to be able to set up a “Welcome to What Will Be Kansas” sign and hand out complimentary baskets to the first arriving wandering hunter-gatherer homo sapiens?
Interestingly, there’s a great deal of debate over this (and I’m not counting the creationist “they’ve always been here” argument).
I think it’s pretty much agreed that humans were here 14 thousand years ago, mostly on the coasts. Once you start getting older than that, you’ll find folks on both sides; some claiming that 12-15 thousand years was the first of them, others 30-50 thousand, and I’ve even heard claims of 100K+, although I think that position is a bit of a fringe argument.
Jared Diamond states in “What We Believe But Cannot Prove,” that the evidence for people in the Americas more than 14K years ago is very weak, and that he doesn’t think it will ever be shown that they were here before then.
I’m writing a novel (isn’t everyone?) based on time travelers messing with history 12 thousand years ago, so if you do make the trip, come talk to me when you get back and I’ll change it to a documentary.
The first Americans are generally thought to be from the Clovis culture, dating back about 13,500 years. There have been claims of a pre Clovis culture reaching back up to 50,000 years. It is unclear if the pre Clovis culture was familiar with gin rummy.
That was impressive misuse of coding, it should read
The first Americans are generally thought to be from the Clovis culture, dating back about 13,500 years. There have been claims of a pre Clovis culture reaching back up to 50,000 years.
History Channel or Discovery Channel had a show on this recently. Point being that the first Americans may well have been Europeans. I don’t recall the timeline, but it may have been up to 50,000 years ago.
Kansas? Hmm, my WAG would be a nice even 10,000 years. As far as seeing the first humans in NA, I think that TimeWinder and Tapioca Dextrin’s figures of c. 14,000 years seems about the consensus.
From the Wikipedia article on the Clovis culture that Tapioca Dextrin linked to:
I’ve never heard of this hypothesis before, but it’s interesting. Given the nature of Wikipedia, I’m not sure how seriously most researchers would take this hypothesis.
The Discovery programme postulated that pre-clovis man came from what is now France based on the similarity of artifacts found in both areas and that as there was plenty of floating ice in the Atlantic( it being during the Ice Age) so that the nomads “berg hopped” and survived on sea life.The flaw I see in that theory is not allowing for the epossibility of of seperate but replicated invention.
After posting this thread and reading up on responses, I found this site, which says: “The discovery of 40,000 years old human footprints in Central Mexico challenges accepted theories on when and how humans first colonised the Americas.”
Evidence for the Clovis culture is extensive and able to be radio-dated. There are a number of sites thought, on reasonable grounds, to predate the Clovis people, but for one reason or another they are not easily verifiable as to dates. Two such sites are in western Pennsylvania not far from metropolitan Pittsburgh and on Santa Catalina Island off the Los Angeles, California coast.
He’s pretty conservative, though, and gives little attention to the older claims. Properly so, I think, since the evidence for the oldest claims is spotty and requires a lot of extrapolation. We’re in a period of “I don’t know” right now. Wait another decade and some of the evidence will be better understood.
The notion of European colonization mentioned by Waenara is pretty well discredited today but again who knows what the future will say.
This is pure conjecture and not generally accepted in the scientific community.
Probably the best documented and most accepted pre-Clovis site is Monte Verde in Chile, dated at 12,500 years BP. Claims that humans were in The Americas 20k, 30k, or 40k years ago are not substantiated. They may be at some point, but not now.
Correct. Monte Verde is now accepted by most archaeologists, though there are still a few holdouts. With that early a date for a site so far south, many archaeologists now assume dates of 14,000-15,000 BP for the first entry into the Americas. Anything much earlier than that is still highly controversial.